IRAQ'S WAR TOLL ESTIMATED BY U.S.

By PATRICK E. TYLER,

Published: June 5, 1991

WASHINGTON, June 4—
The Defense Department has estimated that 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 300,000 wounded during the Persian Gulf war, the first official attempt to fix the Iraqi death toll in what military officials said was a "tentative" exercise based on "limited information."

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a heavily qualified estimate, which was immediately challenged.

"Upon review, it has been determined that little information is available which would enable this agency to make an accurate assessment of Iraqi military casualities," said Robert C. Hardzog, chief of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act staff of the intelligence agency, in a letter dated May 22.

"An analysis of very limited information leads D.I.A. to tentatively state the following" and then Mr. Hardzog noted parenthetically that the estimates carried an "error factor of 50 percent or higher."

The agency estimated that about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in action, about 300,000 were wounded in action and about 150,000 deserted. The letter response did not mention Iraqi prisoners of war, who totaled more than 60,000 at the end of the war, according to officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia.

The estimate on deaths was similar to that reached by the allied command at the end of the war.

The letter did not explain what kind of "limited information" formed the basis of the estimate and Pentagon officials said today that they could not expand on the letter's disclosure without reviewing Mr. Hardzog's file. The letter did not address civilian casualties during the war, which are thought to be considerably less.

With the prisoners added to the equation, the Pentagon's first official accounting adds up to 610,000 Iraqis on the battlefield, which is far more than the 540,000 figure the Pentagon has said was its official estimate of Iraqi soldiers in the Kuwait theater of operations at the outset of the war.

By applying the D.I.A.'s error factor of 50 percent, today's estimate suggests that Iraqi casualties and desertions could have been as low as 275,000 and as high as 775,000, an estimate which on the high range would far exceed the Pentagon's previous statements on Iraqi troop strength.

Responding to the critcism of the figures released, Lieut. Col. Rick Oborn, a Pentagon spokesman, said he agreed that the 50 percent error factor in the D.I.A. estimate would lead to high range estimates that could not be accurate.